America's addiction to scientism has addicted 1 in 4 American women to SSRIs, because of the mistaken belief that such therapy is "scientific" and therefore warrants the creation of such an unprecedented pharmacological dystopia -- dystopia for human beings, but a godsend for Big Pharma of course, whose bottom line has increased by several orders of magnitude over the last half century. Americans feel all warm and cuddly when they hear the party line that such antidepressants 1 fix some chemical imbalance in the brain, failing to realize that, A, this was originally a PR line, not a medical claim, and B, the latest evidence shows that such meds cause the imbalance that they claim to fix.
Even if we grant the idea that some chemical imbalance is being fixed, the real question is, what constitutes a cure for depression? Is depression cured when a tranquilizing med keeps folks from worrying as much about their lack of satisfaction in life, or is depression cured when a patient sees through the fog of masochistic bad habits and begins seeing the wonders in the world around them? The psychoactive medicines that we fear and criminalize hold the ability to waken new worlds in our minds and make us finally see the world around us in all its wonderful detail and possibility. But psychiatry is never so ambitious as to aim for that kind of cure, one that can restart a life. A real solution for depression does not pay very well, and if they truly championed such a move, they would have to risk their jobs by publicly holding the Drug War in contempt, something very few American professionals are willing to do.
So we westerners shrink in horror at the thought of tribal men in robes availing themselves of non-addictive psychoactive plants to cure what ails a person -- or an entire community -- yet we have our own superstitions. We worship the kindly men and women in white robes who lead us through the ritual of clinic visits and prescription writing, even though the meds in question make us lifelong patients. Well, at least we're being cured scientifically, we think, and not by those evil plants of the rainforest. So we're addicted for life? So what? We're still proudly scientific!
This is just one of those problems that is just too enormous to be seen by anyone in America, immersed as we are in the omnipresent self-congratulatory banter of the status quo, our proud scientific country marching forth with "cures" -- cures that make everyone cheer except the patient, who finds themselves disempowered and abandoned, even by the so-called addiction experts who know better than to characterize Big Pharma 23 dependency as addiction. Why not? Because "addiction" is a political term in a Drug War society, where we ban medicines, not based on science but based on the fears and prejudices of pharmacologically challenged politicians.
Trump's lies about America's voting process are typical NAZI and DRUG WAR strategy: raise mendacious doubts about whatever you want to destroy and keep repeating them. It's what Joseph Goebbels called "The Big Lie."
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
This is why "rock stars" use drugs: not just for performance anxiety (which, BTW, is a completely UNDERSTANDABLE reason for drug use), but because they want to fully experience the music, even tho' they may be currently short on money and being hassled by creditors, etc.
Had the FDA been around in the Indus Valley 3,500 years ago, there would be no Hindu religion today, because they would have found some potential problem with the use of soma.
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
Americans have learned nothing but half-truths and lies about cocaine and opium thanks to the total censorship of drug benefits.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as freely as Benjamin Franklin.
The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?
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